No matter how many years have passed, there are always going to be a LOT of bad players who cannot follow the simplest instructions or manage aggro during a boss fight, collectively leading to wipes and rage.
1 Like
Most of my vanilla raiding experience was when my server(Magtheridon) didnât even have 40 60s on the Alliance side. I imagine this was around 1.2 maybe close to 1.3âŠGear was the kickerâŠeveryone had blues from Scholo, Strat and UBRS and that was it. We did Lucifron but Magtheridon was impossible. I imagine running at 1.12 will be a lot easier so maybe there will be more gear available than we had available.
Donât forget threat and resource management!
1 Like
In general, patch notes donât tell the entire story either. Few people left now, actually played a mage at a high level in Vanilla. AoE leveling/grinding was nerfed. Rolling ignites were nerfed. There were so many ninja nerfs that happened that were undocumented.
Whatever exactly happened to tanking in 1.11, SOMETHING happened. Argue about semantics, numbers, and exact skills all you want, but unless you were a clueless dps or you didnât get very far in Naxx, you knew something was up. It was clear as night and day.
2 Likes
Actually, the way it was explained to me is also the best match for the sources people have quoted.
Incorporation in live of written ability warnings and visual warnings about where damage areas will be landing help a lot with making bad players less problematic, though. Granted Deadly Boss Mods did some of that in Vanilla, but youâll always have a lot of people who donât use various mods.
Great post. This is an important point. We even felt a big difference in wipe recovery time in WotLK. It just became less and less costly/punishing to wipe. Along with everything you said about that and with professional gaming guilds Blizzard basically has to design encounters that way.
That is the WotLK version of Heigan.
In Vanilla he has two phases.
Phase 1 he is in the middle of the room and slowly does the poison explosion on the floor. While doing that he is doing two things to the raid.
- Everyone in melee range gets a debuff that lowers their health by 50% and it has a nature DoT that ticks for about ~400 damage.
- AOE mana burn that also deals shadow damage equal to the amount of mana consumed.
Phase two is the infamous âdanceâ. In the original he also teleports three random players to the Eyestalker gauntlet and they have to run back through a poison cloud that ticks for heavy damage.
In my opinion Gothik the Harvester 1.0 requires far more coordination and careful use of CC, threat, burst DPS etc. It would be a more fair comparison.
The comment on threat is fair, but not completely accurate. Players who canât manage their threat donât get to Naxxramas level of the game. Threat management by the DPS becomes an increasing part of being good at the role as the gear becomes amazing.
Similarly a tank that isnât good at threat wonât get to Naxxramas level of the game. However, threat isnât guaranteed and is its own thing that has to be coordinated.
No guild that will make it this far considers it to be a trivial thing that doesnât fit into the strategy of the fight.
1 Like
I was a progression raider during vanilla. As part of the experience that included long hours wiping before encounters were downed. Harder encounters sometimes took days or weeks to down.
Worst was when I was a member of the number 3 guild on the server and we got stuck on twin emps in AQ40. 2 months spent wiping on that encounter without downing it. Eventually that one fight caused virtually the entire raid team to quit and join one of the two higher progressed guilds.
Spending lots of time learning and wiping on encounters hasnât changed. That at least has remained constant throughout WoWâs history.
But that doesnât mean encounters havenât gotten gradually tougher over the years. Todayâs intermediate and harder mythic raid encounters in retail would look ridiculously hard to any vanilla raider ⊠with mechanics an order of magnitude harder to learn and master.
All experienced vanilla raid DPS were used to monitoring their threatmeter for the first minute or so of the fight (at least until 1.11 when you only needed to monitor the first 10 seconds or so). The goal was to ride the line just under where you would grab threat until it became a non-issue. It became so second-nature to do so it took almost no effort.
Monitoring a threatmeter was easy. It was like an extra damage meter. I kept mine in the lower right corner of the screen. Monitoring and controlling threat took a LOT less effort than handling any of Retailâs modern mythic raid encounter mechanics for intermediate and higher mythic fights.
It really depended on the guild. Vanilla raid guilds were in a hierarchy. The top guild on the server could recruit anyone it wanted from the next guilds down. Also the top guilds tended not to lose people since the only place to go was to server transfer elsewhere. And only late in the expansion when server transfers were enabled.
If you were further down the totem pole you would tend to lose people whenever higher progressed guilds poached them from your guild. Your guild would then obtain replacements by poaching them from the guilds just below yours in progression. This created a ripple effect which would resonate all down the totem pole and could affect most of the guilds on the server.
Sure. Just like doing mechanics is easy now because the game tells you exactly what you need to do. And letâs not forget that, in addition to getting broken on patches, threat meters were unreliable or nonexistent for much of Vanilla raiding.
Top guilds lost people to burnout, fission, and drama.
3 Likes
Addons existed in vanilla that eventually had to be broken because they played the game for you.
They never broke threat meters.
Rotations were actually rotations back in vanilla instead of priority queues that change based on numerous random factors, so playing your rotation optimally is a joke in vanilla compared to retail.
Mechanics were stupidly simple compared to retail and just as obvious. Also you didnt have to focus on anything but the mechanics since you could macro your rotation to a single button.
If you were having trouble with all but a few bosses, bring more healers and outheal the fight since you have about 1 boss per tier with an enrage. Compared to 100% of bosses in retail.
Also since dps specs are decently balanced you can set dps checks properly, so it requires people to play there dps well. The difference in dps of a top player in the same gear as an average player is miles larger than it was in classic.
Raids in classic are a joke compared to retail and anyone who says otherwise is mistaken or delusional.
You donât think the 1.11 changes affected threat meters? People who were ignoring their threat meters, maybe because they read their patch notes, were doing substantially more damage than people who were just blindly following their threat meters. Iâm pretty sure that was 1.11 based on this discussion.
Iâve seen the exact opposite. In Vanilla, PVP players moving to PVE raiding initially did less than half the damage that even moderately experienced PVE raiders did. Now, they start out within 10-20%.
Again you lie about threat meters they were never broken stop saying they were. If you failed to update your addon you were the idiot not that the meter was broken.
Also thats a gear issue not a skill issue.
Frost Mages had a 1 button rotation. In retail if you have a 3 or 4 button rotation you are considered as having a stupidly simple rotation.
Not to mention you have trinket procs and cd management which didnt really exist in vanilla.
When you have to lie to defend your point, your point is probably wrongâŠ
Addons took time to fix after updates; in the interim they were broken.
If thereâs a lie going on here, itâs the idea that threat meters were always reliable.
Yes, thereâs a lot more of the âpress the glowy button / step out of the glowy groundâ now than in Vanilla. That doesnât really qualify as skill, though. Thatâs borderline the game playing your character for you.
As opposed to vanilla where the game actually did that?
Until blizz eventually fixed it, but it was around for a long time.
Also if you have to pull dps close to your optimal rotation or the boss will enrage and you wipe, taking the time to watch for that mechanic and move without completely screwing up your rotation and tanking your dps is whats difficult. Sure if you want to just watch for mechanics its not hard, the challenge comes in multitasking which you never had to do in vanilla.
Rotations didnt have to be watching for specific procs to change what button you hit, you always hit the same buttons in the same order every time.
Sure you had to check your threat meter every so often if you were a close to the tank you either popped a threat drop or you stopped dpsing.
Mechanics where you actually had to move or do something were few and far between comparatively.
Also most major addons were ready to go on patch day.
Addons are not âthe gameâ.
This is a joke statement. There are variables that you need to pay attention to in order to optimize your DPS, pretty sure every DPS class had trinkets they could use while some people having procs from weapons and what not.
Sounds like words spoken from someone who has never attempted any difficult bosses in a mythic difficulty raid in BfA or Legion.
Yes, we have DBM to give us prompts, but NO it definitely does not make the game easy.
True.
But the top guild on each vanilla server tended to lose people at a lower rate than less progressed guilds. Lower guilds also lost people to burnout, fission and drama⊠and also had to deal with players being poached by guilds higher on the progression raiding totem pole.
The top guild on the server was immune to player poaching, at least until server transfers were added to the game.
Depended on what class you were doing and what content you were running.
Mages in Molten Core or Blackwing Lair pretty much had a 1-button rotation of frostbolt spam. It was ridiculously easy.
Sure you might have activated trinkets to add to your spam, but you could almost just macro them to your frostbolt button and ignore them.
so youre telling me in the game now a-days you cant macro your spells in a way that will cast stuff based on buffs you have active?
This is a game knowledge thing.
See, Vanilla is a complex enough game that you can drastically increase you DPS by just knowing a few things about the combat mechanics. Add in some oils, firebreath chili, grenadesâŠ
Anyone who stands like their feet are glued to the floor and presses two buttons will get smoked on the meters. Literally not even worth bringing a player that knows that little about the game and how to play.
Most of the replies in this thread chest pounding about Mythic in retail seem to imply Tier 1 mechanics. Every boss in Vanilla is Molten Core difficulty, or at least it is the example that is used to prove a point. Check back on the forums around Christmas, letâs see how that works out.
Believe it or not, it doesnât take 30 mechanics per second and dance dance fever to be a challenge when you arenât forced fed gear and buffs to boost your power every couple of months. There are a lot of dead simple things in Vanilla that will easily kill you because you donât have the DPS, defenses and cooldowns to just lol no.
4 Likes
How many players do Retail raiding guild keep on their roster? I donât mean Method either, like your average raiding guild?